I (Stephanie) had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Erika Fields from Brown Dog Coalition. Brown Dog Coalition (BDC), as you'll learn below, is an incredible foster-based rescue organization based in Massachusetts. Last year, Ran and I began to partner with BDC to provide free office hours once a month for the organization's foster and adoptive guardians. We just love everything that BDC does and are excited to share more about them with you this week ..read more

By Stephanie Keesey-Phelan, Ph.D., BCBA-D Ran and I are Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBA). This doesn’t always come up explicitly in the work we do one-on-one with our clients, but the field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) lays the foundation for everything we do at The Dog Behavior Institute. There are a number of pathways to becoming a BCBA. Ran and I went to Simmons University (formerly Simmons College) and got Masters degrees in Behavior Analysis. During our time in that program, we accrued experience hours which were supervised by a BCBA, took and passed oral exams in front of a ..read more

Interview conducted by: Ran Courant-Morgan, M.S., BCBA, LABA, CCUI, ADT-IAABC, LFPE At DBI we believe that no person, no family, and certainly no dog trainer or behaviorist is an island. If you read our blog regularly, you already know that we believe that if you are a behavior analyst by profession, you are not your dog’s behavior analyst. But you may not know that we often collaborate with other dog training professionals to increase our knowledge and skills, and when we are working with a client whose behavioral presentation falls beyond our scope or expertise. Collaboration with other qual ..read more

Interview conducted by: Stephanie Keesey-Phelan, Ph.D., BCBA, CSAT, CCUI, FFCT At DBI we believe that no person, no family, and certainly no dog trainer or behaviorist is an island. If you read our blog regularly, you already know that we believe that if you are a behavior analyst by profession, you are not your dog’s behavior analyst. But you may not know that we often collaborate with other dog training professionals to increase our knowledge and skills, and when we are working with a client whose behavioral presentation falls beyond our scope or expertise. Collaboration with other qualified ..read more

By Ran Courant-Morgan, M.S., BCBA, LBA Here at DBI, we are preparing for our summer workshop at the Canine Center at Hessian Hill in upstate New York. During this workshop, many dogs will be spending time in the car while they wait for other dogs to finish their turns or while we’re doing human-only exercises. Some people are already familiar with how to do this safely and comfortably, but car crating is brand new for other people (including us!). Here are some resources and tips we have gathered from a range of sources about safe and comfortable car crating. Clean Run actually has a whole sec ..read more

By Stephanie Keesey-Phelan, Ph.D., BCBA In the last installment of Kerby the Herding Dog, I wrote about bringing Kerby to a friend’s farm to see how he felt about sheep. Discovering that he is, in fact, very enthusiastic about sheep and farms in general, it was time to start training. But what to train and how to train it? I’ve already written quite a bit about my desire for a positive reinforcement-based approach, but positive reinforcement training plans can look a lot of different ways.  Trial-and-error learning I suspect that most of us have had some experience with trial-and-error l ..read more

Interview conducted by: Stephanie Keesey-Phelan, Ph.D., BCBA, CSAT, CCUI, FFCT At DBI we believe that no person, no family, and certainly no dog trainer or behaviorist is an island. If you read our blog regularly, you already know that we believe that if you are a behavior analyst by profession, you are not your dog’s behavior analyst. But you may not know that we often collaborate with other dog training professionals to increase our knowledge and skills, and when we are working with a client whose behavioral presentation falls beyond our scope or expertise. Collaboration with other qualified ..read more

By Ran Courant-Morgan, M.S., BCBA, CCUI, ADT-IAABC, FPPE “Leave it” used to be one of my favorite things to teach because it seemed so effective so quickly. I would start by standing in plain view of my dog, who, in most cases, had been eating treats from my hand just moments before. I would then pick up a treat and place it in my palm, closing my fingers around it. And then I would lower my closed fist to the dog’s nose.  Of course, this sweet animal – who, again, had been eating this exact treat from this exact hand just a few minutes ago – would try to eat the treat. They would lean in ..read more

Interview conducted by: Stephanie Keesey-Phelan, Ph.D., BCBA, CSAT, CCUI, FFCT At DBI we believe that no person, no family, and certainly no dog trainer or behaviorist is an island. If you read our blog regularly, you already know that we believe that if you are a behavior analyst by profession, you are not your dog’s behavior analyst. But you may not know that we often collaborate with other dog training professionals to increase our knowledge and skills, and when we are working with a client whose behavioral presentation falls beyond our scope or expertise. Collaboration with other qualified ..read more

By Ran Courant-Morgan, M.S., BCBA, CCUI, ADT-IAABC, LFPE In September 2012, my wife and I took our dogs and went up to New Hampshire for our anniversary weekend. It was our second wedding anniversary; on the first, we had adopted a puppy, and we brought her and our other dog with us for this year’s adventure. The cabin is on a dead end dirt road with the houses of families who have been going there for a hundred years (at that point, it was only 90 years, but you get the idea), and the general culture is that dogs are loose: they run around off leash, sleep on the docks, and visit the other do ..read more